Bill’s Excuses

Most grumpy old men don’t draw a crowd, let alone make national news, by ranting in a bookstore about how their family’s been wronged. But Bill Clinton is an ex-president, and the hubby of Hillary.

So now everyone knows he sounded off in Pleasantville about how FBI chief Jim Comey “cost her the election” by announcing less than two weeks before Nov. 8 that he was re-opening the probe of her private e-mail server.

Yet Comey had implicitly promised to sound the alert if new evidence surfaced — as it did when the investigation of Anthony Weiner’s sexting with underage girls found clintonemail.com messages on his computer.

More important: The FBI probe began in the first place because Hillary opted to conceal her work records — shielding her communications from Freedom of Information requests and from goverment investigations into the Benghazi attacks.

In short, Hillary Clinton bears the blame for the damage done to her candidacy — just as Donald Trump bears the blame for his remarks on that Access Hollywood tape, which damaged him late in the campaign.

The “guilt” factor helps explain why Bill is now also blaming the Russians, though no one really thinks it was the leaks of top Democrats’ e-mails that truly doomed Hillary.

You can write off his comments as a husband standing up for his wife. It’s a lot harder to excuse the wider Democratic denial.